Republicans Can't Count On Electoral College Edge in 2024
The U.S. presidential voting system helped Trump in 2016 and 2020, but not because of built-in bias.
It’s a little bit more complicated.
Photographer: Mark Makela/Getty ImagesSeveral states are still counting ballots, but the best estimates right now suggest that when all is said and done, President-elect Joe Biden will have defeated President Donald Trump by about 4.5 percentage points nationwide. That’s a pretty large margin — bigger than the popular-vote victories by Hillary Clinton in 2016, Barack Obama in 2012, George W. Bush in 2004 or Al Gore in 2000. It’s also bigger than the margins in 1976, 1968, 1960 and perhaps 1948.
And yet Biden needed all of it. To understand why, think about the electoral college arithmetic. Biden won Wisconsin by just 0.6 percentage points. That means that if there had been a uniform nationwide shift to Trump of 0.6 percentage points (plus one vote), Trump would have captured Wisconsin, Georgia and Arizona, which would have produced an electoral-college tie of 269 each, sending the election to the House of Representatives. Trump would have won there even though Democrats are in control because Republicans have majorities in most state congressional delegations, each of which would get one vote. Subtract that 0.6 from Biden’s popular-vote margin and the result is about a 3.9-percentage-point electoral college bias favoring Republicans in 2020.